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I nodded. I’m sure he was right. But I had things to do. I was making my first ragù. Wasn’t this why I’d come to Italy—to be told by an Italian how to make a ragù? I returned to my pot joyfully, relit the burner, and resumed stirring. The meat, long cooked, looked like gravelly dirt. Eventually, Dario appeared. He’d recovered from his Dante recitation and had come to inspect my work. He added some tomato—not much, more tomato water than tomato sauce, deepening the color from dirt brown to dark dirt brown. I kept rolling the meat round, each time pushing some to one side, exposing the hot bottom of the pot, then rolling it back again. With each pass, the meat hissed, and steam enveloped my face. I was hot: the wet-shirt, sweat-pouring-down-my-face-neck-arms routine. Marco Pierre White came to mind (“All big boys season their food with their sweat—you can taste it”), and I wondered if sweat really is a kitchen’s secret seasoning, because there was no doubt where mine was falling, even though it converted to steam on impact.

I had concerns. One was that, in paddling the meat from side to side, I might accidentally push the pot too far—each time it bumped against my knee—and it would tip over, spilling hours of good work. (That’d be the kind of thing I’d do, wouldn’t it? I hugged the pot a little closer.) The other was that my apron, which was floor-length, would catch on fire. I rehearsed in my mind the possible scenario. The apron is secured around the waist with a string belt. To get it off, you had to untie the string. So that was the first thing—untie it. If I didn’t, it could be ugly. I pictured myself in flames, being unable to remove the apron, and Dario’s rushing over, all heroic and decisive, picking me up with his giant hands, hurling me to the floor, and stomping out the fire. (I did not want to be stomped.)

Around five o’clock Teresa looked into the pot. “Dario,
è pronto
”—it’s ready. Dario came over, scooped up some ragù onto the paddle, and shook it, like a tin-pan gold prospector.

“It’s meant to be like sand,” he explained. He tasted it.
“Boh!”
He passed the paddle to Teresa.

She tasted it—
” Boh,”
—and passed the paddle to Carlo.

Carlo tasted it.
“Boh.”

Riccardo tasted it.
“Boh.”

The Maestro tasted it.
“Boh.”

Oh, what the hell, I thought, and I tasted some, too. Everyone looked at me.
“Boh,”
I said finally. (What else could I say?)

Dario tasted it again.
“Perfetto,”
he declared. I stared at it, the hours of my stirring, this dirty sticky sand.

“Pepe!”
Dario called out to the ceiling. Pepper appeared.

“Sale!”
Salt appeared.

“Limone!”
And there was a bowl of lemon zest. Cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg, cloves. It interested me that the seasonings were added after the cooking. The seasonings themselves, this Medici compilation, also interested me. You’d never find these in a conventional ragù. It was nothing like a Bolognese, even if it had the same consistency. (Are all of Dario’s preparations simply polemics dressed up as food? “We have no idea where these things come from,” Teresa told me once. “Dario goes home, he reads an old book, he has another dish.”) I leaned over and took in the new aromatics, which were like Christmas and Easter and mushroomy autumn in one complex smell. Then Dario called out for vin santo—two whole bottles.

My mouth dropped. Oh, no! After all the effort to get rid of the liquid. Am I now going to have to steam this away as well? He poured them in, and I looked inside, disbelieving. It was now soupy. And, just as I feared, I was told to resume stirring. I was tired. Then I was on fire.

The flames started at the hem and, like that—two seconds—the whole apron was burning. Wow! Just like the movies. (It’s animal fat, it occurred to me—of course! I’m a grease fire!) The fire was well under way before I noticed it, even though I’d been expecting it, and had already raced around the apron. It was, fittingly enough, a circle of flames: very
Inferno
-like. But I knew what to do. Evidently, so did Dario. Where did he come from? I went straight for the belt,
fast,
and located the end of the strings so I could undo the knot—a simple bow, one tug. But Dario, with heroic urgency, also went straight for the belt. I was much more relaxed, probably because I’d been rehearsing the fire drill all afternoon. Dario, however, was so focused on undoing my apron knot that he failed to notice that I was already there and grabbed the strings I was already holding. (How do you say, “Hey, Dario, kindly remove your gigantic fucking paws”?) We struggled. My hands went one way, his another, until I found I was once again holding the strings, which was good. But Dario was now clenching the knot itself. How can I undo the knot if his hands are all over it? But between his efforts and mine, the knot somehow came undone. The apron was then ripped off and hurled violently to floor: whereupon Dario stomped it.

Later that night, in something of a metaphysical mood, I was visited by Mr. Commonsense, whom I hadn’t heard from in some time. He addressed me: Why did you want to be a butcher? Doesn’t Benny, in the West Village, give you good service? And this language thing—what’s wrong with English? And why did you ever want to learn to cook? Really—at your age?

T
HE BREAKTHROUGH MOMENT
was
soppressata.
Teresa asked me to help. It was the next day’s project.

From what I could tell, soppressata is pig meat and pig fat in an intestinal casing—like salami, but meatier, fatter, bigger—and each region seems to have its own version. Dario’s is a
sopressata de’ Medici,
a sixteenth-century spelling, because the by-now-familiar Medicean ingredients—cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, citrus zest, and sweet wine—were added to a very gelatinous pork filling. The fascination with the Medicis was a daily theme. I knew elements of the story: that after Caterina de’ Medici left Italy in 1533 to become the future queen of France, she not only jump-started the culinary revolution there but also gave away all of Italy’s kitchen secrets. Her pack train, it was said, had been loaded with lettuces, parsley, and artichokes (familiar in Italy, foreign in France), and her kitchen help included banquet stewards, butchers, and pastry chefs, so that, when she finally settled in, she was able to introduce pastries, custards, profiteroles, vegetables, and herbs to a population that had never had such things, plus the best of Renaissance cooking, along with an attitude of seriousness about food, as well as that enduring utensil, the fork (an Italian invention—how else could you eat pasta?). In educated food circles, much fun is had at the expense of Italians who still think the story is true: there are the Tooth Fairy, and flying carpets, and…Dario, of course, had no such doubts. I understood this after I once remarked on his using shallots in one of his preparations.

“Shallots?” I asked, exaggeratedly perplexed. “Dario, aren’t shallots French?” It was a mischievous query. Dario did not respond well to suggestions that his food was covertly Gallic.

“No!” he boomed. “No! No! No!” According to Dario, shallots were another item introduced
to
the French
by
Italians. “How long have you been here?
Boudin blanc,
” he exclaimed, referring to the French white sausage. “
Boudin noir! La crème caramel! Le soufflé! La crépinette!”
He was shouting.
“Le pâté! La mayonnaise! I salumi—la charcuterie! Canard à l’orange!
These dishes did not
originate
in France! They
arrived
in France!”
Tutta la cucina e arrivata!
“Until Caterina de’ Medici, there was no grand French cooking!”

Dario’s face was red. I thought of coming clean: “Hey, Dario, just joking!” No chance. He wouldn’t be stopped. He cited German dishes, Viennese dishes—” The
Sachertorte
? Eh? From Sicily!” Argentine ones.
Chimichurri
—the country’s beef preparation? “Where in the dick do you think that comes from?” Maybe he’d had too much wine at lunch, because he then declared that “most of the world’s cooking”—
tutta la cultura della cucina è nata nel Mediterraneo
—“comes from the Mediterranean, and most of
that
comes from Tuscany.”

I stared at him blankly, taking in the proposition that Tuscans, ultimately, were responsible for all the good cooking everywhere.

(Then again, maybe he was right. I’d been surprised how many items I’d always thought of as French were on a traditional Tuscan menu—like crêpes,
crespelle
in Italian, or flan, called
sformato.
)

This morning, the soppressata reminded Dario of Armandino’s stay in the butcher shop. When he’d been here, Armandino had video-recorded everything he was taught so he could reproduce it when he returned to Seattle. But, as Armandino couldn’t speak Italian, he had used Faith Willinger as his translator—Mario had introduced the two to each other. During a soppressata-making session, Armandino stood on a stool filming, just over Dario’s shoulder, and Willinger provided a steady commentary in English. Suddenly Dario became very upset. Making soppressata involves three people, and, for Dario, those three people had always been his father, his mother, and his grandmother. They are now dead, and it was too much—there were just too many associations—and Dario exploded in a sentimental outburst. “It takes three people to make soppressata! One person can’t do it!” He ordered Armandino down from the stool and told Faith to shut up, get dirty, and help.

This time I was the third person, joining Teresa and the Maestro. First I was told to weigh the meat, a pot of leftover pig bits: two hundred pounds of knuckles, heads, toenails, tits, tongues, plus some misshapen parts I couldn’t identify. The Renaissance ingredients were added, and it was all boiled slowly until it became a thick, gray sludge, at which time the fire was turned off and the pot was allowed to cool—but only a little. A pig’s bony bits are full of gelatin, and they solidify like cement if they reach room temperature.

We began. Teresa worked from the pot, filling a cup with the lumpy mixture and emptying it into a canvas sack, not unlike a coarse sock, which she then handed to me. I tapped it twice, letting the mixture settle, and wiped off the sides—goo seeping through the weave—closed it up, and passed it to the Maestro, who gripped it firmly from the top, his gigantic hand enveloping my puny paw. He then rapidly looped a string around the bundle, like a parcel for the post office.

We established a rhythm. Teresa, the handover to me, the Maestro. At some point, Teresa started humming. She hummed so much I rarely noticed her humming: it was a background noise of cheerfulness. But the Maestro noticed, and he joined in, whistling. The tune was “’O Sole Mio.”

The three of us continued. Teresa filled a sack, I tapped it, the Maestro tied it. Meanwhile, Teresa hummed, and the Maestro whistled. Then they reached the end of the song. The Maestro cleared his throat.

No, I thought. He wouldn’t dare.

“Che bella cosa,”
he sang. It was an impressive baritone.
“Na jurnata ’e sole.”
What a beautiful thing a day in the sun is. I don’t think I’d heard the words before. I was impressed that someone knew them. Then again, if anyone was going to know them, he probably would, wouldn’t he? (After all, he’s Italian.)

Teresa replied.
“N’aria serena,”
she sang. Hers was a perfectly reasonable mezzo-soprano, and I was impressed that she, too, knew the words. She filled up another sack and handed it to me, singing,
“doppo a na tempesta.”
In the serene air after a storm.

This was all very sweet. The problem was the song, and the real problem, for me, was that I’d lived in Britain, where a corrupted version was the theme tune in a television advertisement selling a factory-made fake Italian ice cream called a “cornetto”: Venice, gondolas, and some guy in a beret singing “Just one more cornetto” to the refrain of “’O Sole Mio.” I was finding these two versions difficult to reconcile: on the one hand, “just one more cornetto,” openly accepted as a joke; on the other hand, this Italian hill town, the making of soppressata according to a Renaissance recipe, surrounded by people who were singing this landmark piece of Italian kitsch in earnest. And they knew the words. And it wasn’t a joke.

“Pe’ ll’aria fresca,”
the Maestro continued,
“pare già na festa.”

“Che bella cosa na jurnata ’e sole,”
Teresa replied, and set down her sack. The Maestro put down his as well and took a deep breath. They were preparing for the high notes of the famous refrain.

(No, I found myself saying quietly, Please, don’t do it. Aren’t you embarrassed? Please stop.)

They didn’t stop. They tilted back their heads, projected their voices to the ceiling, and bellowed:
“’O sole mio,”
they sang in unison,
“sta ’nfronte a te! ’O sole, ’o sole mio…”

(I felt so humiliated on their behalf. Didn’t they know that this was an ice cream ad?)

When they finished, they were silent. Finally Teresa spoke. “Bravo, Maestro,” she said, wiping away a tear.

“Brava, Teresa,” the Maestro said, clearing his throat.

The refrain continued in my head as I walked home that night. Who would believe what I’d witnessed? No one would believe it. I’m not sure I believed it, except that I was covered with the evidence. I had soppressata gunk all over me, two fingers were stuck together, and it was going to take some scrubbing before I liberated them. (You’ve got to wonder: what must your stomach go through before it digests this stuff?) I’d stepped in some as well, scarcely surprising, since, in the three-person handover, there had been soppressata slopping all over the floor. I could hear it: it made a sticky suction-cup sound as my heel pressed into the pavement and tried to come away again. Meanwhile the refrain continued. In fact, I was humming it. It might be kitsch. It might be an ice cream ad. But I had to concede: it was catchy. Also, I couldn’t remember another job where people sang while they worked. I liked that they did. I liked that I was here, making this strange food.